How It Works
What to Expect
From birdhouses and cutting boards to video games and short film animations—students experience a wide range of project ideas while enrolled in our courses. Fundamentally, students will learn to Design, Code and or Build their way through a situation. We are truly looking to unite their creativity with the technology on hand and anything is possible with students that take on these courses seriously.
Our Courses
Courses run inside computer lab classrooms or within the maker space shop area. The tools and resources within Hacker Lab are a part of the course curriculums and instructors manage the interactions between students and tools. The use of shop tools like saws, drills and sanders are carefully managed within the courses, and the more technical tools such as the Laser Cutter and 3D Printers should be booked under the instructor for the times those courses are active. The use of internet and computer software is frequent within these courses and as such, proper supervision and culture is developed around internet citizenship and computer usage.
Students enroll in courses that run once a week for 90 minutes. They may enroll in multiple courses if they wish.
Day Courses:
Monday – Thursday, 9:00AM to 3:00PM
After School Courses:
Monday – Thursday, 3:30PM to 5:00PM
Schedule At Your Convenience
You choose the day and time that works for you. There are 3 courses for homeschool families per day, meeting once a week. Available time slots are 9:00AM, 11:00AM, 1:00PM. For after school students, there is a 3:30PM time slot where students meet twice a week.
Small Group Sessions
Each class has a maximum of between 4-7 students. This allows for a concentrated download of knowledge and skills from the instructor to the group. This also enhances the collaboration potential between students and instructors.
Student Pickup/Dropoff
A 15 minute pickup/drop off window is allotted before and after each course. Parents may enter the facility to pickup/drop off as well as chat with the instructor during these windows. If a student arrives early or late to their course, they will have to be let in by a front desk attendant and wait for their instructor to bring them into the proper area for the course.
Learn Cutting-Edge Tools
In the shop, we open students up to a whole new world of design and manufacturing with the wide range of tools available. From saws and drills to CNC, Laser Cutters and 3D printers, we like to show students what their possibilities could be. We also teach the latest and greatest tools for bringing your digital ideas to life. Blender™ for 3D assets and rigging, Unreal Engine™ for world building and game mechanics, and for beginners, Scratch™ and Roblox™ for game development. These are just a few of the tools and skills you will learn. The skills learned with these programs will benefit you far beyond the projects that students make in the course.
Course Projects
These courses are project based and will rotate every 4-8 weeks depending on the scope of each project and other factors such as holiday, etc. Students will be able to store their shop projects on site while they are being worked on. After that allotted project time is over, students are required to take their projects out of the facility. Computer based classes will expect students to save their files on a cloud service such as Google Drive as the lab computers are expected to be wiped of all student files frequently.
No Prerequisites Required
We specialize in teaching total beginners. Some of our students start off not knowing the difference between left-click and right-click, and that’s okay. We welcome all skill levels.